Femiphobia

The six men addressing my
undergraduate sexuality class have two
things in common. First, they all look
fabulous: fit, muscular men, with square
jaws, short neat hair, and stylish
masculine clothes. They look like models from J. Crew or Banana Republic
catalogues, which may be one reason
why many more female than male
students are asking them questions. I
see the looks on the women's faces as
they listen to the panel, and they convey wistful attraction. This is due to the
hopeless nature of the attraction-
hopeless not because the men are 10
years older than my students, but
because of the second thing the men
have in common: they are all gay. Because the class' subject is sexuality, I
have asked my students not to hold back
from asking questions of interest even if
the questions are personal or explicit.
(The men on the panel have assured me
that such questions are okay.) The students eagerly oblige. "How and when did you come out to your
family?" Answers ranged from

Rick's "I
haven't yet" to Ben's humorous account
of telling his mother: "She was visiting me
at college and I took her out to dinner. I
told her 'I have something to tell you,' and she looked very worried. At that point the
waiter leaned over and said to me 'Just
tell her honey!' When I told her, she was
relieved and said that she had been
afraid I was angry at her." "Did you ever have sex with a woman?"
Four of the guys have (two enjoyed it,
and two did not), and two have not. "Can you give the girls in the class some
MouthAction tips?" The men agreed that it is
important to actually enjoy giving oral
sex, and not to use one's teeth. "Do you really enjoy it when a man with a
large penis has anal sex with you?"
Answer: "Honey, you don't know what
you're missing." "Professor Bailey says that gay men are
usually feminine during childhood. Does
that describe your childhoods?" I am
happy that someone has brought this up,
and I am eager to hear the panel's
responses. Ben says,

"I wasn't much different than other boys. What about the
rest of you guys? Anyone want to say
anything?" For a few moments the
remaining men look at each other and
shrug, and then Ben says "Next
question?" I am disappointed with the lost
opportunity to hear recollections of
childhood femininity. To be sure, many
gay men do not recall being markedly
feminine boys, and a few even recall
being more masculine than average. But I suspect that this panel does not consist
only of gay men with masculine
boyhoods. Rather, I think the guys
avoided the question. This explanation is
consistent with their body language and
their eagerness to go on to the next question. It is also consistent with my
past experience talking with many gay
men about femininity, especially
femininity during childhood. I immediately think of two episodes
during my career as a scientist studying
this issue. The earliest occurred in Dallas,
where I had traveled to interview gay
twins for a study regarding the

the genetics of sexual orientation. I had a standard interview, which included questions about childhood gender nonconformity. ("Were you ever called a sissy?" "Did you ever dress up in girls' clothes?" and so on.) I had noticed that during this part of the interview some of the gay twins looked uncomfortable. One twin in Dallas took a long time to answer-he had, in fact, been a very feminine boy-and then he told me, "I haven't thought about those things in years." I think he wished I hadn't made him remember. The second incident occurred recently when I gave a talk at a conference on sexual orientation. During my talk I showed a short video of a feminine boy dressing in girls' clothes and playing with dolls. Afterwards, a local gay politician approached me, smiling uncomfortably. He thanked me for my presentation and said that he thought it was extremely important work. But he confessed that watching the boy in the video was a wrenching, "obscene" experience for him. He had just

revisited his own childhood
from his present perspective and found it
disturbing. Reactions like these have been common
among the gay men I've spoken to about
childhood femininity. In fact, of all the
controversial topics related to male
homosexuality, the contention that gay
men tend to have been feminine boys (and may be feminine men) has provoked
the most discomfort and dispute. Initially,
I found this odd, because the link
between childhood gender
nonconformity and adult homosexuality
is one of the largest and best established associations regarding sexual
orientation. But after repeatedly
encountering this kind of reaction, I
began to think something interesting was
going on. I made up a word to describe
gay men's attitude: femiphobia. (Independently, the writer Tim Bergling
came up with "sissyphobia." Why are gay men femiphobic? Part of it is
adverse childhood experience. I don't
think that either the gay twin or the gay
politician would endorse the

the belief that
childhood femininity is a bad thing, but
both behaved as if it were something to be ashamed of. I inferred that as boys,
both men had been subject to the
shame-inducing disapproval of others,
including parents and peers. To be
reminded of this is unsettling. But I have
come to realize that it is not only childhood mistreatment that causes gay
men to react negatively to the suggestion
that they are, or were, feminine. To
explain the other reasons requires some
additional knowledge, and so I will return
to them. ********* I have omitted several pages not directly
relevant to this issue. ********* The main characters of the movie, The
Birdcage (originally a French Film, La
Cage aux Folles) are a gay couple. One
of them is a very masculine man, and the
other is a flamboyant drag queen. In the
movie, they clearly take separate roles as husband and wife, and this is a common
stereotype about gay relationships. In
this chapter I have been arguing for the
accuracy of some stereotypes about gay
men. What about this one? In 1995 I became interested in using
personal advertisements to study gay
men's mating psychology. One can learn
a lot about what people want in mates by
studying these ads. They cost money, for
one thing, and when people have to pay for each word, they try to make every
word count. When describing whom
they're looking for, people often have a
mixture of idiosyncratic desires ("likes
opera" or "enjoys camping", but when
the same preferences recur in ad after ad ("tall, dark, handsome, and rich;" or
"attractive, sexy, and fit", you know these
are commodities that most people want.
For example, psychologists have
analyzed personal ads to show that
straight men are much more concerned than straight women about a potential
mate's looks; straight women are more
concerned about resources and the
ability to acquire them: income, wealth,
ambition, a good job, and intelligence.
You can also tell a lot about the mating market by they way advertisers describe
themselves. Advertisers want to entice
readers to answer their ads, and are
sometimes quite creative in their self-
description. So the self-descriptive
adjectives also tend to be those that are highly valued.

When my lab first started looking at gay
personal advertisements, we were struck
by a couple of differences from straight
ones. First, gay men's ads were much
more explicitly sexual than straight men's
were-I will explain why I think this is so in the next chapter. The other difference
was that gay men's ads used many more
words related to gender conformity and
nonconformity, such as masculine,
feminine, butch, femme, straight-acting,
straight appearing, and flaming. This suggested that these traits were
important to many gay men, but how so?
If gay men tended to pair off as in The
Birdcage, we would expect to see both
advertisements in which the advertiser
described himself as "masculine" (or "butch" or "straight-acting" or something
similar) and requested a "feminine" (or
"femme" or "flaming" partner; and
advertisements with the reverse pattern
("Flamer looking for butch guyä.". We
would expect to see similar numbers of both types. In order to check our
expectation, we looked at more

than 2,700 personal ads placed by gay men.
For each ad, we looked for gender-
related words and we kept count of how
often the advertiser: (a) requested a masculine partner, (b) requested a
feminine partner, (c) described himself as
masculine, and (d) described himself as
feminine. Forty one percent of all the ads
had some gender-related word. What we learned suggested that The
Birdcage is indeed fiction. When
advertisers requested either masculine or
feminine characteristics in a partner, they
requested masculine traits 96 percent of
the time. Furthermore, when they described themselves as masculine or
feminine, it was masculine 98 percent of
the time. Both what gay men seek and
how they represent themselves suggest
that they are massively biased in favor of
masculinity. Or is it a bias against femininity? In all 72 ads in which an
advertiser was explicit about what kind of
gender-related trait he did not want, it
was a feminine trait; "no femmes" was
the most common reply.

A second question is less easily dismissed. Perhaps gay men who place personal ads are not representative. Perhaps their unusual characteristics or preferences are what necessitate placing such ads in the first place. Maybe most gay men love feminine men, and because feminine gay men are plentiful, they don't need to advertise for them. To answer this question this we did a second study. We made up mock "gay dating brochures," each of which profiled two competitors. Each profile had both a picture and a self-description of an ostensibly gay man. Some of the pictures were of very attractive men, others of average-looking men, and the rest were of men we considered very unattractive. One of the descriptions was: "Good-looking masculine gay man in early twenties seeks partner for relationship. I am in shape and enjoy rollerblading, jogging, and tennis. I live in the city and would like someone with whom I can share everything from an exciting evening in town at the clubs to a relaxing day at

at the museum. My hobbies
include traveling, being outdoors, and
listening to music." The other descriptions were similar. The
key word in the description above is
"masculine." A third of the time, that word
was included in the description; a third of
the time, "feminine" was substituted for it;
and a third of the time neither "masculine" nor "feminine" was included.
Each brochure contained one description
with either "masculine" or "feminine" and
one description with neither term. We went to a gay-oriented bookstore, a
gay gym, and a gay pride rally, and we
asked gay men to look at the brochures
and choose which person they would
prefer to date. Most of those polled
chose the physically attractive men in the brochures-no surprise, gay men like
good-looking guys. But the raters also
strongly preferred the brochures with the
"masculine" self-description. Substituting
"feminine" for "masculine" had about the
same effect as substituting an average- looking man's picture for a very attractive

one. The idea that gay men want masculine partners may be surprising to straight people, but it is less so to gay men. Jaye Davidson, the actor who played the homosexual transsexual in the movie The Crying Game explained: " To be homosexual is to like the ideal of sex. Homosexual men love very masculine men. And I'm not a very masculine person." The gay (and flaming) humorist Quentin Crisp speculated about gay men: "To understand what kind of man they most admire it is only necessary to guess what they wish they themselves were- young, frail, beautiful, and refined. Hence their predilection is for huge, violent, coarse brutes." Whether or not Crisp's explanation-gay men want masculine men to feel more feminine- is correct, he recognized the preference. When gay men say "No femmes," what is it, exactly, that they are eschewing? Gay men tend to be feminine in several ways, including their interests, their voices, and their movements. (Although it is unclear that the gay accent is a

feminine accent, even gay men discuss it as if it is.) Do gay men dislike hairdressers, men who speak with a gay accent, men with limp wrists, or all three? One relevant but surprising finding from our study of gay interests, speech, and movement patterns is that a gay man who acts feminine in one respect doesn't necessarily display other feminine traits. For example, gay men who sound the gayest do not tend to be the ones with the most feminine movements or the most feminine occupations. If our results are correct, then knowing that a gay man is a hairdresser tells you nothing about how he sounds or moves. When I ask my gay friends about what feminine traits they dislike, they usually begin by talking about the voice. An older acquaintance related how once in a gay bathhouse, he was on the verge of having sex with a very attractive and muscular stranger, when the stranger spoke. "When he opened his mouth, a purse fell out. I got limp." But when I went to a Halsted bar with my gay

graduate
student, he was able to determine which
men he would likely reject merely by watching them move. We don't yet really
know what gay men mean when they say
they dislike femmes. This leaves the question of why. When I
talk about this with other psychologists,
the most common suggestion is
internalized femiphobia-femininity has
been punished so often by the straight
world that gay men, too, come to hate it. This makes sense to me, but it is not the
only plausible hypothesis. Another is that
behavioral masculinity characterizes the
prototypic man. If one is attracted to
men, then one will be attracted those
with masculine behavior. The second hypothesis is less malevolent but more
pessimistic than the first. The second
hypothesis implies that femiphobia is not
due to societal intolerance but is intrinsic
to male homosexuality and is not
remediable even by reforming straight society to make it less homophobic. It
suggests that across time and place, gay
men will desire masculine men,

and thus, acknowledging their own femininity makes them feel undesirable. We don't know yet how universal the gay male preference for masculinity is, although most of my foreign gay friends say that it is true in their locales as well. Earlier in this chapter I suggested that having been mistreated as feminine boys is not the only reason gay men tend to react uncomfortably to the implication that they are, or used to be, feminine. The other reason, which I hope is now obvious, is that gay men themselves dislike femininity, or at least they find it sexually unattractive. To call a gay man "feminine" is not only to say that he is a target of many straight men's ill will, but also that he is less attractive than he would be otherwise. It is certainly an unfortunate state of affairs that gay men tend to be feminine, tend to be less attracted to femininity, but tend to be stuck with each other. There are similar ironies in straight relationships. The designer of the universe has a perverse

sense of humor.

errr. Durrent! Stop telling us! Why did I even click

This one is here writing a gay novel.

Eddygourdo:
This one is here writing a gay novel.

Ignorance is no excuse to be stopid

iamdurent:
Ignorance is no excuse to be stopid

and yet you can't spell "stopid"

Eddygourdo:
and yet you can't spell "stopid"

Maybe u should help me spell it.
Goat